Should I Wait to Get Pregnant After a Couple of Vacations? Honest Advice From a Parent Who Waited
The rain streaks the window of our neighborhood coffee shop, and Lila twists the new engagement ring on her left finger while her iced oat latte sweats onto the table. She and her boyfriend just got back from two weeks in Portugal, they have a fall trip to Japan booked and a spring long weekend in the Rockies saved for, and her mom has been texting every other day asking when they’ll start trying for kids. “I keep going back and forth,” she says, stirring her drink so hard the ice clatters. “What if I get pregnant now, and I have to cancel all this? But what if I wait, and something goes wrong later? Should I just wait to get pregnant after these trips, or am I being stupid?”
I lean back and stir my own coffee, because I’ve been right where she is. Five years ago, my husband and I had just closed on our 700-square-foot starter cottage, we had two trips paid for and non-refundable: a 10-day backcountry road trip around the Canadian Rockies we’d been saving for since our wedding, and a Caribbean cruise for my grandma’s 80th birthday that the whole family was attending. All the older women in my family were split: half said start trying now, you never know how long it takes, don’t put it off for fun. The other half said go enjoy your trips while you can, you’ll never get that time alone again. I laid awake at night scrolling baby forums, the same question bouncing around my head that Lila’s asking now.
I ended up waiting. We went on the Rockies trip first, and I’m so glad I did. We hiked eight miles a day, ate cheese curds and gas station burritos that would make a prenatal dietitian wince, slept in a tent that leaked halfway through the trip when a thunderstorm rolled in. I got bad altitude sickness at 10,000 feet, and my husband had to carry my pack down the mountain while I leaned on a walking stick and complained the whole way. We ended up at a tiny lodge that night, sharing a clawfoot tub too small for two people, laughing so hard we snort-laughed when we got soap suds in our hair. If I’d been pregnant, even early pregnancy, I would have spent the whole trip worrying about the altitude, about not being able to take the meds that helped my sickness, about falling on a slippery trail. We would have skipped the backcountry camping and stayed at fancy resorts the whole time, and it would have been a completely different trip.
Then the cruise: I stayed up until 2 a.m. playing blackout bingo with my grandma, drank three piña coladas a day, went zip-lining over a rainforest, and laid on the beach for six hours straight reading a romance novel that was 90% sex scenes. None of that was risky or reckless, but it’s not something I would have enjoyed or felt comfortable doing pregnant. When we got home, we started trying, and I got pregnant after three months. Our daughter is four now, and we bring her camping every summer, but it’s not the same as that trip we took just the two of us.
That doesn’t mean waiting is the right call for everyone, though. I have a friend who’s 36, she has a history of irregular periods, she decided not to wait when she had a European trip planned two years ago. She started trying, got pregnant two months in, and still went on the trip. She swapped the wine for non-alcoholic sparkling, skipped the 10-mile walking tour of Edinburgh she’d planned for a leisurely castle lunch, and had a great time. It worked perfectly for her.
From my experience, there are a few concrete things you can do to figure out what’s right for you, no generic “follow your heart” fluff. First, write down what you actually want to do on each trip, not what social media says you should do. If it’s a relaxing beach week where you’re mostly sitting and eating good food, you can do that at almost any stage of early pregnancy just fine. If it’s a multi-day backcountry hike, a trip to a remote area with no nearby hospital, or a specific experience that’s off-limits for pregnant people (like many traditional onsens in Japan, or certain high-adrenaline activities), that’s a different story.
Second, check the fine print on your bookings. A lot of airlines, hotels, and tour companies let you change your dates for a $50 to $200 fee these days, especially if you bought travel insurance. If your whole trip is non-refundable and would cost thousands to reschedule, that’s a good reason to wait. If you can move it for a small fee, you don’t have to wait if you don’t want to.
Third, talk to your OB or midwife about your personal health history. If you’re under 35 and have no history of reproductive issues, waiting an extra 12 to 18 months for a couple of trips is very low risk for most people. If you have known fertility challenges or are older, that changes the calculation, and your doctor can help you weigh the tradeoffs instead of letting internet strangers or family members tell you what to do.
We walk out of the coffee shop into the rain, and Lila pulls up her Japan itinerary on her phone to show me: three days of hiking in the Japanese Alps, a 4-hour standing sushi bar in Tokyo, an onsen in Hokkaido that explicitly doesn’t allow pregnant guests. “I don’t want to go and spend the whole time worrying, you know?” she says. “What if I never get to do it the way I want to?” I tell her that’s a good enough reason to wait, and she calls her boyfriend on the walk to the car to tell him that’s what they’re going to do.
I don’t know what the future holds for her. Maybe she’ll start trying after the trips and get pregnant right away, maybe it’ll take a few years, maybe there will be things she didn’t plan for. But I do know she won’t spend the rest of her life wondering what that trip would have been like if she’d gone before the baby. That’s worth more than any timeline anyone else can give you.
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